by Walter Chaw Ernst
Lubitsch took
chances, none greater than To Be or Not to Be. Released
in the first
months of America's involvement in WWII, in that initial flurry of
propaganda
that saw the Nazis as murderous, animalistic, inhuman Hun, Lubitsch
chose
instead to portray them as ridiculous, as human--to make a comedy, a
farce...and
a masterpiece, as it happens. It's a crystallization of his work in
that way:
He's always more interested in foible than in oppressive arcs of
personal failure--if
Nazis can be seen to be possessed of the same faults as the rest of us,
the
same vanities, the same fears. Make no mistake, To Be or Not
to Be is no
olive branch. Seventy years on, it remains among the most withering
satires of
totalitarian governments and the politics of groupthink, but it
suggests that
Nazism is just one of many insufficient sops to the insecurities
hardwired into us--that we're all just thin projections strutting and fretting
our hour
on the proverbial stage, each susceptible to things that would give relief from the pain of lack of self-confidence and identity. It's a
film that
seeks to explain why people create cults of personality. That it sets
itself
amongst a theatre troupe performing "Hamlet", itself a play that houses
another play within itself (holding a mirror up to nature, indeed),
makes total
sense in a picture that, through this absurdity, seeks to highlight
greater
absurdities. Of all his great films (and when push comes to shove, I'd
say Trouble
in Paradise is and likely always will be my favourite
Lubitsch), To Be or
Not to Be is inarguably his greatest.

A troupe of Polish
actors performing on the eve of the Nazi invasion finds itself
embroiled in a
tale of intrigue, adultery, international secrets, and life and death,
of
course. Lubitsch imagined the role of lead actor Joseph Tura for Jack
Benny,
who'd appeared in other films but was best known at the time for an
outrageously-popular radio program on NBC. Benny jumped at the
opportunity but
was beset by insecurities, unrelieved by Lubitsch's reassurance that
the
comedian was cast because Lubitsch believed he would be an actor
playing a
comedian in constant fear of being discovered. Whether it was meant as
comfort,
the effect of making Benny more nervous plays into Tura beautifully.
It's
Tura's anxiety that gives To Be or Not to Be its
dull undercurrent of
terror: terror of being discovered, terror of being betrayed. Tura is
married
to grand dame Maria, played by the incomparable Carole Lombard in her
final
role, and her unmatched lightness and undimmable joy make this
character's
narcissism acceptable, adorable even, as she allows young admirer
Lt.
Sobinski (Robert Stack) of the Polish Air Force to shower her with
attention.
Meaning well, somehow, Maria arranges her secret, ego-affirming
rendezvous with
Sobinski to coincide with Tura beginning the "to be or not to be"
soliloquy, but Sobinski getting up and leaving while Tura's on stage alone is perhaps a greater blow to Tura than actual adultery. As
with so
many of the meticulously-crafted gags in the film, it's really the
set-up
for a later punchline, it's true, yet it hints at larger truths.

Consider an early
moment where an extra, Greenberg (Felix Bressart), asked only to carry a
spear, says that his greatest aspiration is to play Shylock, the better
to
deliver the "If you prick me, do I not bleed" speech. Lubitsch likely
knew that "The Merchant of Venice" was, from 1933 or so on, a tool of
Nazi propaganda. He knew, I want to assume, that in 1942 there was a
production
staged by Paul Rose in Berlin, in which planted audience members
cried out
in horror and derision at Shylock during the trial sequence when, let's
face
it, Shylock tries to commit a legally-sanctioned form of murder. Take
it for
what it's worth, the play in this environment made The Final Solution
an act of
self-defense. It's like a Tea Party meeting where people show up with
Confederate flags, ne-c'est pas? First you create
an Other, then you
call it patriotism; now you have motive. Shakespeare was one of the
only
foreign playwrights not banned by the Third Reich. I believe Lubitsch knew
all that
when he wrote this sequence--and if he didn't, he has the fall-back of
being a
genius who didn't have to know it to predict it.

In 1943, Werner Krauss
(of The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari fame) played Shylock at Vienna's
Burg theatre in a
production directed by a card-carrying Nazi. By all accounts, Krauss
portrayed Shylock as a monster. (I want to imagine, too, that Klaus Kinski's
embodiment
of Nosferatu in Herzog's version is an homage to Krauss's
manifestation.)
Anyway, Greenberg delivers the speech wistfully, and we laugh because
this is a
minor actor with a large dream. He delivers part of the speech again in
the
sadness of the ruins post-Blitzkrieg, and we cry, because it's too
terrible. When Greenberg finally does get his moment to shine, it's under
unbelievably trying and dangerous circumstances, and the feeling we get
then is
something very much like ecstasy. I mean that in the original
derivation of the
word: "ex" and "stasis," standing outside oneself. It's as
much a "meta" moment of disconnection illustrated by performance as
the audition sequence in Mulholland Drive. Now
consider that this gag is merely a parallel "shadow," an embellishment, of a primary gag
involving an actor, Bronski (Tom Dugan), who has a life's ambition to
play
Hitler--and gets his chance, too. To Be or Not to Be
is no kidding a
work of real art.

And those are just
three of the layers of one gag that would continue to yield if one
insisted. To
Be or Not to Be is a puzzle box of jokes and asides--nods to
the proscenium
that play like Shakespearean fourth-wall-breaking appeals and incisive
character notes that deepen the drama while feeling as light as air.
Tura's
extraordinary narcissism matches Maria's; when war is declared, Tura
thinks at
first that all the uproar is for the interruption in his performance.
But the
way Benny plays it, we see the absolute insecurity that was always
barely
beneath the surface of Benny's own urbane/delicate comic persona. It's
casting
as elegant as Hitchcock correctly identifying Cary Grant as a bit of a
reptile,
or Tarantino some twenty years after the fact recognizing what it was
that
made Travolta so fucking exciting back when he was new. (It was melancholy.)
Because
Lubitsch balances Tura's cuckolding with Poland's desecration, once Tura
exhibits selflessness and courage, we understand it as an allegory for
the
Polish resistance and somehow, in the syllogistic equation of Sobinski
with the
invaders, we comprehend the message that war is a personal thing with
real
victims and intimate ugliness. It's like the adult discovering that
long-idealized sex is actually embarrassing: smelly and intensely
biological.
If it's possible to make an anti-war movie, make it a compelling
analogue to being cheated on. Lubitsch does that.

And rather than depict the Nazis as soulless machines, he portrays Nazism as another in
a perpetual line of dogmas and scriptures meant to reduce choice,
knowledge,
experience--the vehicles of ideology are men: flawed like us,
hopeful like
us, misled like us. Cults promise returns to Eden in that way, they
promise the
ability to un-eat the fruit and put it back on the tree. Lubitsch's
Nazis know
the difference between good and evil, but they've decided to let
someone else
worry about that, so when a group of them is ordered to jump from a
plane
without parachutes, they do it. On the one hand, it's a damning
indictment of
groupthink and fanaticism, easy to laugh at--and audiences do, without
fail. On
the other hand, it's condemning any apocalyptic cult following,
unquestioningly, charismatic leaders into the void. The whiff of "there
but
for the grace of..." lingers heavy on this satire.

To Be or Not to Be isn't as narrow a
thing as a criticism of Hitler and
the Reich--it's as dangerous a thing as a self-reflexive critique of
any
unconsidered position at the expense of a perceived good. When Tura's
troupe
wanders, shell-shocked, through the ruins of their Warsaw, it's
impossible for
the modern viewer not to think of the Allied-delivered devastation of
Dresden,
or Hiroshima, or Tokyo in that same war, nor of the wars upon wars
since that
have seen the slaughter of civilians as the key to a leadership's
surrender.
More, it's hard as a modern American viewer not to see the ruins of the
World
Trade Center: a stark reminder that the mantle of victimhood shifts
conflagration
upon conflagration--as does, Lubitsch would be quick to remind, the
mantle of
the oppressor. After all, Tura agrees to kill a man without any inkling
of why.
To Lubitsch, "shock and awe" would have been "of course"
and "yes, that again." It's no wonder the film was controversial upon
its release. The overwhelming vibe of it, after all, is empathy.

Tura, Maria, and
young Sobinski are drafted to spoil the plot of traitor Professor
Siletsky
(Stanley Ridges), who, armed with names within the Polish resistance,
has
returned to Warsaw to deliver them to his masters. A seduction scene
ensues and
the Maria we met trying to keep up with the lies that publicity has
told on her
behalf ("What goldfish? What farm?") becomes a creature so capable of
deflections and feints that she parries off Siletsky long enough for
her
husband to come, reluctantly, to her rescue. Threads of Tura and
Maria's
domestic squabble entangle throughout with the greater ideas and themes
of the
film. The Tura Company's production of their original play "Gestapo"
is cancelled on the eve of its debut by a figure meant, I
think, to
evoke Nazi George Cyssling, the so-called "Hollywood Nazi Consul" who was tasked with quelling anti-Nazi sentiment in
major
studio productions under threat of an "Article 15," a boycott of American films in the German market. It's an action that causes another performance of
"Hamlet" and, as it happens, another walkout by Sobinski--the final
connection between the personal and the political, and To Be
or Not To Be
is off and running. As the theatre is evacuated and the actors take
shelter in
the basement, one of them says, in response to a wry comment about the
lack of
need to fight for "Gestapo" now, that, no, the Nazis have their own
drama to act out on a bigger canvas. I think here, too, of a death
scene played
later in the film as a curtain rises on that same stage within a
stage.
There's an apocryphal tale, related in Scott Eyman's Lubitsch biography Laughter
in Paradise, of a set visitor on the day of shooting the
Nazis marching
into Warsaw. She was an exile from Poland and "fainted dead away" at
the sight of the stormtroopers goose-stepping again on a West Hollywood
backlot, clarifying again the metatext of the piece--and the metatext
of all
film, frankly.

Shots of posted
billets around occupied Warsaw--the promises of internment in
Concentration
Camps that, at the time, most didn't know were extermination
camps--lend the piece an instant dread that's only accrued over time,
while a
copy of Anna
Karenina is cannily used to deliver a key morsel of
intelligence, it being another tale, of course, of the aristocracy on the
rocks,
infidelities, secrets. The series of shots up, through, and around
stairway
bannisters in the ghetto where we're reintroduced to the glamorous
Maria is as
visually forbidding as anything in contemporary noir. While Lubitsch
isn't regarded as a visual filmmaker, sometimes (here and in the
shadowplay
of Trouble in Paradise), he has something on his
mind. To Be or Not
to Be ends as high-stakes farce, with the actors switching fluidly between
impossible situations and sudden impersonations. It's the hotel
choreography of
the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera, but with
the threat of torture,
assassination, and rape, and with the fate of the world hanging in the
balance.
Although funny, closer to the truth is that it's hysterical.
The energy
is raw, the banter is witty, urbane, and frayed around the edges. As
Geoffrey
O'Brien's lovely Criterion essay on the film clarifies, the only
character who
isn't funny is Siletsky--not because he's demonic, but because he's pragmatic.
He tells Anna that he only wants to be on the winning side. He assures
her that
Nazis are often very human, and Anna says, in the film's key
moment,
"I'm convinced of that." There are better films than To Be
or Not
To Be, though not many, and while I'm watching it, I can't
think of a one.

THE
BLU-RAY DISC
Criterion brings To
Be or Not to Be to Blu-ray in an outstanding 1.37:1, 1080p
transfer struck
from a new 2k scan of the nitrate camera negative. The image exhibits all
the
virtues of a nitrate source, namely rich blacks and wide, subtle
dynamic
range. Criterion has added their usual spit-polish without sacrificing
grain or
fine detail. Overall, the presentation is deliciously tactile, as near
to
perfect as one could hope. The LPCM uncompressed centre-channel mono audio is
satisfyingly
crisp, although, like the company's recent release of Medium
Cool, it's
mixed low, and turning it up reveals a soundtrack that has perhaps been
leeched
of too much noise.

David Kalat records
an excellent feature-length commentary that tells the key tales of
production
while providing good historical background from both a Hollywood
perspective
and a European theatre one. I've heard much of this stuff before from various sources, chief among them the Eyman biography and William
Paul's Ernst
Lubitsch's American Comedy, but I did appreciate Kalat's
lively comparison
of To Be or Not to Be with Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds,
among other modern
references. Well-prepared, well-studied, it's an honourable yakker for
a film
that rewards endless interpretations. The 2010 French documentary Le
Patron (53 mins., 1080i) is staid stuff but a good primer on Lubitsch. Some rare clips of the man
at home
and in action make it especially worth the ride. "Vintage Radio Programs: The
Screen
Guild Theater" (56 mins.) offers two episodes of the titular show, the
first
featuring Jack Benny, the second a production of To Be or
Not to Be with
William Powell and Diana Lewis. They're amusing for what they are but
ultimately feel like completist's fluff.

Pinkus's Shoe Palace
(Schuhpalast Pinkus)
(45 mins., **/****) is a 1916 German silent directed by and starring
Lubitsch
that resonates insofar as it contains seeds of his future
brilliance.
Compare this to stuff like Hitchcock's The Pleasure Garden,
which it
resembles in style and, to some extent, execution. For
the curious, it's one in a series of films about young Berlin Jew
Sally
(Lubitsch) and his climb from rags to riches in the cobbler trade.
Bittersweet,
knowing what we know. It looks great here, by the way, in full HD.
O'Brien's
pamphlet essay, as mentioned above, is fantastic, truly--a smart,
sharply-written
overview of To Be or Not to Be that checks off its major themes and highlights.
Joining
it in the booklet, a Lubitsch-penned op-ed published in the NEW YORK
TIMES in
response to Bosley Crowther's cluck-cluck-clucking review uses too much
of the "box office, bitch" argument for my liking, but lands a few
cogent points about the efficacy of his film. There's something of a
recognition in the essay that Lubitsch is perhaps ahead of his time and
talking to
idiots, but so be it. His defiance in leaving in the line about Tura
doing to
Shakespeare what the Nazis are doing to Poland speaks loud to the
personal
nature of To Be or Not to Be for Lubitsch. Damned
if it doesn't become
something of a personal movie for everyone once seen.